CHAPTER XI
A FOOL AND HIS FORTUNE
Slyne skirted a flower-bed cautiously and, approaching the shadowy background by a flank movement, found a stout individual in a voluminous coat kneeling on the grass there, with some white, metallic object in one trembling hand lifted in the direction of his own left eyelid. A second Click! startled Slyne disproportionately, and he spoke at that, in a very querulous voice. "Hey! you fool," he said, "you're wasting your time. Wait till I show you how.
"Good Lord! is that you, Jobling?"
Mr. Jobling suddenly cast a revolver from him, with a wailing execration, and, attempting to rise, sank down beside it, blubbering, entirely unstrung after the agonising strain of the past few seconds. Slyne, eyeing him with exasperated contempt, picked the weapon up and fingered it for an instant.
"A damned rotten make!" he commented morosely. "But it'll do the job for you all right now. You can't shoot it off, you know, with the safety catch set."
The miserable man on the grass held out his hand for it, humbly. But Slyne was not at all prepared to take any risks on his account—for suicide and murder are often very difficult to distinguish, in their results—and made up his mind to keep it, in the meantime at any rate.
"Get up," he ordered in his sharpest tone, "and come away out of this. If you could only see yourself, you wouldn't want to sit there and whimper."
Under the spur of that insult Mr. Jobling seemed to recall some stray shred of his forfeited self-respect. He got on to his knees, with an effort, and thence by degrees to his feet.
"I think you might show a little more decent feeling," he sobbed brokenly, "when—"